Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

City hall is civic symbolism, one steel beam at a time

“They’re building that already?” asks a guy I bump into on Friday, after that morning’s topping-off ceremony for the new Las Vegas City Hall. “I thought they were still arguing about it.”

For those of you not fluent in construction terminology or symbolic civic gestures, you top off a building by hoisting the last beam into place, but not before you invite media and dignitaries, establish a rigid shade-ocracy — important people on the covered platform, everyone else vulnerable to the sun — and rise to the grandiloquent occasion.

“This is a day of celebration,” Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman intones, holding an air horn like a guy who knows how to use one. He’s photo-ready in his hard hat and million-dollar smile. Click. The girders of the new city headquarters at First Street and Clark Avenue — yes, they’re building that already — rise behind him as he says, “It’s a very important day for all of us.”

Although it’s hard to gauge the real importance of a mostly ceremonial point in the construction of a building that some people don’t even know is going up, I get what he means. For Goodman, especially now, the project carries a heavy symbolic load: It alludes to a promise of civic and economic vigor, jobs, forward motion, the sort of bold moves other entities are too chicken to make.

City Hall Topping Off

A view of the new Las Vegas City Hall under construction in downtown Las Vegas Thursday, October 15, 2010. The project is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2012. Launch slideshow »

Renderings of the 310,000-square-foot building show it to be a pair of intersecting glass cubes, fronted by a stand of treelike solar panels. Apropos to Las Vegas, I suppose, nothing about it fits our notions of what a city hall looks like — traditional, columned, maybe a nice dome. This could be the corporate HQ of a prosperous manufacturing company.

That doesn’t mean it can’t do what we want a city hall to do: be an eloquent presence, both from the street and as part of the skyline, that not only imparts a sense of present and future solidity, but gives us at least a tiny tingle of civic pride. (And, of course, helps lock down Goodman’s legacy as his term dwindles. That is what we want, right?)

Then again, after decades of the current City Hall, a blank curve that suggests nothing more than an 11-story cold shoulder toward the people, pretty much any old pile would suffice. So it’s got that going for it.

From his shaded perch, Goodman is deep into his windup: “We’ll have a city hall that, by its very architecture, says to the people that they have a voice!”

Outside the construction site, an excellently grizzled old dude, hauling a small bag and unruly beard up First Street, raises his voice. “There’s your tax dollars at work!” he snarks, gesturing toward the grid work.

Well, actually, isn’t a lot of it funded by stimulus bonds …

“Who do you think owned that land before they spent your tax dollars on it?” he insists. “Oscar Goodman’s son, that’s who. So you see how it works.”

I don’t think that’s actually true about Goodman’s son …

But he was halfway across the street by then, still talking, I’m not sure to whom.

Two women at the corner ignore him — one has a boyfriend on the construction crew, so she has no doubts about the project’s importance.

A few minutes later, Goodman guns his air horn, and the sound rolled up Clark. The beam sailed up toward its pinnacle.

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